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P-CEP Logic & Reasoning And Honors Philosophy
See how one teacher has found ways to make a difficult class work for students learning from home.
Home Learning Highlight for May 14, 2020
P-CEP Logic & Reasoning and Honors Philosophy
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Some classes are easier to present in an online format than others. Classes such as Logic & Reasoning and Honors Philosophy are difficult enough in a traditional setting, so Plymouth-Canton Educational Park teacher Jon Forslund spent a great deal of time thinking of the best way to help his students understand the curriculum with the electronic options he had available to him.
In Logic & Reasoning, students are studying formal, symbolic logic in covering sentential (a.k.a. propositional) logic. Before the quarantine, his class had covered truth-tables and truth-trees. Now he is introducing natural deduction. To help students better understand, Forslund uploaded short videos to YouTube that review truth-tables and cover the basics of truth-trees. He also uses a PointPoint presentation he posted on his MyClasses (Moodle) site. He then uses the same presentation to do natural deduction proofs using a document camera and visualizer software.
A2 Natural Deduction: Background (YouTube video, ~8 min)
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In Honors Philosophy, students just finished a metaphysics unit and are now beginning ethics. Forslund also uses PowerPoint presentations that he uploads to his MyClasses site. He also refers students to supplementary videos that are linked to the MyClasses site and provides the basis for a short essay (on driverless cars) that will be due by the end of the two-week unit. He even includes videos to help students better understand, such as The Trolley Problem, which is an ethical dilemma that engineers and programmers cite in industry as a “thought experiment.”
Ethics: Utilitarianism & the Trolley Problem (YouTube video, ~8 min)
Forslund is making the most of a difficult situation by considering students' needs first when making decisions on how to best teach these complex subjects.
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This press release was produced by the Plymouth-Canton Schools>. The views expressed here are the author’s own.
